The house, they should sell. Obviously, they should. But they’d grown up there. How did you sell away so many memories? How did you sell the door jambs with their growth charts marked up in butcher pencil? Or the gouge in the brick fireplace from when Angie and Matt had been playing swords with their dad’s golf clubs?
Or the garden their mom had taken such pride in? Or the room they’d built out with their father when she’d had a stroke and lived out her last years locked into a still body? They’d taken such care to make that room something pretty despite all the machines and medical gear, to make it something that could bring joy to her despite her condition.
His mom. Fuck, he couldn’t sell away the house his mom had built their family in.
He was surprised to see both Tina and Matt’s cars in the driveway. Normally, he was the only one who checked regularly on the house he wouldn’t sell or rent or live in. It was just a block off his route home, so it took nothing to swing by. Matt and Tina both lived within a couple miles of the place, but Matt came by only if Angie mentioned there was a repair needing doing, or some kind of upkeep, and Tina only came to abscond with something—like at Christmas, when she’d taken all the old ornaments and their mom’s elaborate Christmas village set.
The winter had been cold and dry, without any major storms so far, so the walk hadn’t needed shoveled, and there weren’t any weather-related repairs to see to. The cold kept the lawn and gardens dormant. And Christmas was over. There was no reason for them to be in the house.
Angie parked behind Matt’s car and, out of ancient habit, walked to the side door and went in at the kitchen.
Matt and Tina were in the kitchen, packing up the cupboards.
Angie stopped dead in the doorway and took in the scene. “What the fuck?”
Open boxes covered the large island. Butt rolls of butcher paper and fresh rolls of bubble wrap took up most of the table. All the cupboard doors were open, and his brother and sister were wrapping plates and glasses. They didn’t stop what they were doing because he’d come in; they barely seemed bothered by their treachery.
His sister was closer. He stomped to her and snatched the half-wrapped plate from her hand. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Tina just blinked at him, her big brown eyes as round as the plate in his hand. Usually, she was a mouthy little shit, but when she was upset, she had trouble getting her words going—and that was his fault—so he knew he’d scared her. Just now, he wasn’t sorry for that. “What the fuck are you doing, shrimp?”
“It’s time, Ange,” Matt said from across the island.
“Time for what?”
“Dad died almost a year ago. Mamma died almost fifteen years ago. It’s time to let the house go.”
“So you thought you’d sneak in and do it without me?” He slammed the plate on the island. It cracked inside the loose paper wrapping. Fuck.
“N-no, Ange.” Tina said. “No. We just ... thought ... we thought it would be easier if ...”
“If it didn’t look so much like home anymore,” Matt finished.
Tina shot their brother a dark look. She hated when people finished her sentences for her.
She usually talked fine and sounded normal to most ears. She was a speech and occupational therapist, with a PhD, and knew all the tricks for coping with a disability, and she’d mainly overcome her own.
The disability she’d gotten when somebody looking to hurt Angie had beaten his baby sister almost to death. And made him watch.
It had taken Tina a long time to forgive him. He still hadn’t forgiven himself.
Angie pulled in a breath and got his temper under control. He focused on his sister. “What’s he talkin’ about, Teenie?”
She set her hand on his arm. When she answered, her words were slow, but smooth and clear. “Matt and I thought it would be easier for you to let go if you didn’t come in every time you were here and see the home we grew up in. We’re not selling anything yet, or giving anything away. We’re just packing it up for now. So you see the house and not the home.”
“That’s all you see here? Just a house?”
She shook her head. “I see home, too. But I see the holes where Daddy and Mamma belong, too, and it hurts. I’m ready to say goodbye to this place.”
“But behind my back?”
“Would you have agreed?” Matt asked. Angie sent an angry snarl his way. Matt was always the reasonable one, the responsible one. It got old.
No, of course he wouldn’t have agreed. “None of us need the money.”
“It’s sad, Angie,” Tina said. “Letting it sit here all empty and lonely. It makes me sad.”
He sighed and looked around the room. He could sit in any room of this house and see his whole life play across the surface of his mind.
He’d been kind of a shitty kid, always looking for trouble, always finding it, picking on the easy targets. He hadn’t been much better as a young man. He’d barely skated through high school, preferring to surf and smoke and fuck. He and Joey Pagano had torn up the boardwalk every summer when they were teens and just past—prowling for hot bikinis and being all-around shallow shitheads.
He and Joey had been tight in those days. Until Joey had gotten shot, and become disabled, and Angie had decided he was a weak suck. And then he’d been an outright bastard to his old friend.
Lots of people thought he was still a bastard, and most of them were right.
Now Tina was married to Joey, and they’d come to terms enough to get along. But that old scar still throbbed between them.
He’d been a shitty kid, and a shitty young man. Maybe he was still shitty. Poor Brenda’s orphaned daughter would very likely think of him as the bad guy who’d gotten her mother killed. A lot of people thought of him as a bad guy. That was his job description.
But he’d had a good family, and they’d made a good home here. No matter the tension he’d felt with his father, no matter the disappointment he knew he’d caused both his parents, no matter the torments he’d cooked up for his younger siblings, this had been a good home. A good family had lived here. His family.
He hadn’t appreciated that nearly enough while he’d had it. He’d spent his whole goddamn life pushing against these walls, resisting what they’d held. And now they were empty.
“If we sell it, the new people will change it,” he said. He heard the little boy’s whine in his voice and coughed to try to cover it.
Tina’s little hand slid into his. “They can’t take what we had here away, though, Angie. Nobody can take that.”
She was right. They were both right. Obviously, they were right. But he couldn’t say yes. He simply could not. All he managed was, “Do what you gotta do. I gotta go.”
He shook his hand free of Tina’s and went out the way he’d come in.
~ 6 ~
“I feel like Scarlett O’Hara,” Giada gasped. “Do you think those women ever took a full breath?”
Tori, her personal stylist, laughed and closed the final hook on the black satin corset that would torture Giada through the night like a heretic at inquisition.
“Why d’ya think they swooned so much?” Tori answered in her broad Southie accent. “They was all suffocating to death.” She leaned back and surveyed the shaped she’d forced Giada’s body to make. “But it’s gonna be worth it. You’re gonna look wicked hot in that dress.”
Tori had been dressing Giada for fifteen years and was one of the most elegant, polished people Giada knew, a highly sought-after fashion icon in Boston and beyond, but she was a girl from the block at her heart. She only let her natural voice loose around people she felt close to. To dress a woman well required knowing more than the woman’s size or even her preferences. It was an intuitive, intimate bond. Giada and Tori had become friends, real friends, years ago.
But Tori only literally dressed her for formal events such as this, when the clothes were too complicated to manage well alone.
Giada wasn’t fat; she didn’t ev
en carry extra weight. But she wasn’t a stick. She watched what she ate without obsessing over calories, and she worked out regularly in ways she enjoyed. She had her mother’s figure, which, at its best, was what people called ‘hourglass’—a curve at the hip, a slightly more than average bust, which she’d had augmented in her mid-thirties, when gravity had started to take hold. At forty-five, however, despite her generally good care of herself, the middle of that hourglass had softened a little. Everything, in fact, had softened a little. Gravity would not be denied.
But she liked to dress to be noticed, and tonight, she especially wanted to draw the eye. The couture gown she’d chosen for the Marconi-Bustamante wedding reception was a deep crimson, Mikado silk, off-the shoulder trumpet gown. There was no room for error.
Ergo, Spanx and this Spanish Inquisition corset. Who needed breath?
For the wedding itself, held in a glorious, extravagantly beautiful Catholic Church near Central Park, Giada had worn a fairly sedate garnet-red skirt suit, but the reception here at the Ritz-Carlton was a fully formal affair. Silvio Marconi had one daughter, and he had put his all into giving her the wedding or her dreams.
And it had been a beautiful wedding, a full Mass with an opera singer for the procession and recession. Ilaria’s custom wedding gown, awash in dazzling crystals so she’d glittered like the sun, had needed four attendants just to deal with the royal-cathedral-length train.
Ilaria had always been a spoiled brat, a demanding little mean girl, even as an adult. Giada did not envy the twelve women she’d conscripted into service as her bridesmaids. No doubt she was a Bridezilla to put all others to shame.
Giada had been to dozens of weddings, and had been a bridesmaid at eight of them. She knew that, no matter how how expensive, how perfectly planned, how carefully executed, all sorts of things went wrong at a wedding, from someone forgetting the feather pen at the guest book, to the wrong cake being delivered, to the bride’s gown getting damaged at the last minute.
She’d been to one where the groom had gotten so wrecked the night before he’d passed out on a toilet in the men’s room of a grungy bar, his equally plastered buddies had forgotten him, he hadn’t been found until the cleaning crew came in after closing, and he’d woken up in the ER the next morning, forty-five minutes after the ceremony was scheduled to begin.
That was probably the worst one.
Things went wrong at weddings.
Ilaria’s wedding had looked splendid and seamless, and she was gorgeous, but Giada wondered if the bride were enjoying her day, or if she’d found dozens of things to complain about because they weren’t absolutely perfect. She pitied the poor slobs who’d have to face Don Marconi if they’d disappointed his princess in some small way.
When she was a girl, Giada had dreamed of a fairy-tale wedding, too. She’d been in high school when she’d first clearly understood what she’d lose if she got married, and she’d set aside those dreams right then, but as a little girl, she’d fantasized about being loved by a handsome prince and glittering down a long aisle to him, just as Ilaria Marconi had done today.
As a girl, Giada had thought she needed rescue. As a young woman, she’d understood that rescue was passive. Victims needed rescue. What she needed was power, which would render rescue unnecessary. So she hadn’t married, or loved. She’d worked. She’d achieved.
“You ready?” Tori asked and went to the dress form, where the Mikado silk confection awaited. Giada had booked this room adjoining her own at the Ritz for the weekend, for Tori and all her gear. She’d also arranged for makeup and hair, but that was already done, and those women had been paid and sent on their way.
Giada took the deepest breath she could and forced her lungs to fill. “I’m ready.”
~oOo~
Giada walked into the ballroom on her uncle’s arm, and was utterly unsurprised to find the reception twice as lavish as the wedding. Here at the Ritz, Vio hadn’t been constrained by the rules of the Church or the will of the priest. He’d no doubt thrown money at the hotel until he’d gotten what his little girl demanded.
The vast room glowed with warm amber light, accounted for by the massive rococo chandeliers hanging from the arched ceiling. At one side of the room, separated from the rest of the room by a large parquet dance floor, was a stage, lit with gold and pink lights, where a band was playing a surprisingly jazzy arrangement. At the other side was a large bar. Fifty round tables, each seating ten, were arrayed through the rest of the space, in such a way to seem randomly scattered but symmetrical at the same time. An enormous crystal vase, at least two feet tall, served as a centerpiece to each table, full of two dozen long-stemmed cream and blush-pink roses. Swags of crystal and gold beads draped around the vase. Six flickering electric tapers surrounded the vase and threw dazzles of crystal light over the place settings.
The place settings, each marked with a small tented card with a name written in gold calligraphy, were bone china, sterling silver, and cut crystal, and the linen napkins were monogrammed in one corner with gold thread—a large, ornate B framed with a smaller, equally ornate D and I, for David and Ilaria Bustamante.
Five hundred monogrammed linen napkins. Well, alrighty then.
Giada was impressed. Even in her girlish fairy-tale dream days, she hadn’t imagined a wedding as lavish as this. She really had to give it to Vio. The hotel was surrounded by Feds and police, all of them listening in. Likely some of them were dressed as catering staff here at the reception, or other service personnel throughout the hotel. But Vio had given his daughter a wedding where all her guests, and possibly the bride and groom themselves, could forget those plain sedans and vans, meant to be invisible but all the more noticeable for their aggressive blandness. Ilaria could be a princess today, and pretend the world stopped at the doors of this sparkling room, her realm.
Enzo chuckled at Giada’s side. “Daddy’s little girl,” he muttered.
“Apparently. Shall we find our table?”
Enzo led her deeper into the room. They found their table near the wedding party, one of the closer, among close family. No doubt it had been Vio demanding that the Council be placed above aunts and uncles, and the couple’s friends.
None of the Paganos was here yet, but she found their table—near their own, but a bit closer to the head table. The table of most honored guests. That was to be expected; not only was Nick the most powerful don in New England and the head of the Council, but he and Vio were good friends and lifelong allies.
She and Enzo were the first at their table, which was all Saccos. According to the gilt-trimmed place cards, Giada and Enzo had been seated on the opposite side of the table from Tommy and Fallon, and she doubted it was an accident. Not everyone in their world knew her feelings for her brother, but Vio knew enough to put some distance between them. And a giant centerpiece.
Giada didn’t sit yet. She had timed her entrance well; the ballroom was a bit more than half full, and the bride and groom had not yet arrived. At the church, the crowd had been too dense, and the February weather too cold, to do more than offer best wishes to the happy couple and make her way to her hired car. She wanted to mingle now, get what she could out of the way, so she could focus on her primary interest of the evening: Angie Corti.
She had no particular interest in Angie himself, but she had a deep and keen interest in strengthening her alliance with the Paganos. In all the hours she’d planned and considered this thing she meant to do, during one of her many bitter ruminations on the infuriating entrenchment of tradition in their world, it had occurred to her that there was one tradition she might use to her advantage. It was a tradition throughout all of history, and even within their world. La Cosa Nostra considered themselves a family but conducted themselves as an alliance of monarchs. Just like monarchies had done for millennia, families often forged or strengthened alliances through marriage.
Giada had no intention of marrying anyone, especially not before she’d made her move. She certainly had no
intention of marrying Angelo Corti, whose short attention span with women was well known. Good lord, no.
However, he was the available man with the most sway in the Pagano Brothers, and if she could not only be seen to have Nick’s affection but be said to be seriously involved with one of his closest friends and advisors? That could heavily reinforce her position and sway hesitant men to her side when she moved on Tommy.
When she killed Tommy. She was going to have to kill Tommy.
But she didn’t need to think about that yet.
She’d suggested to Nick that the appearance of such a connection could be useful to them both—to her in her quest, and then, with her at the head of her family, she could return the favor of strength when he made his half-blood heir. He’d been reluctant, surprisingly so, but Giada was a good dealmaker. So was he, and he respected her. They’d found their middle ground.
“I’m going to do a turn, Zio,” Giada said.
Enzo had been waiting for her to sit so he could. Now, he pushed her chair in and pulled out his own instead. “I’m going to get off my old feet, then. They don’t like these shoes. Anyway, nobody wants to see me.”
“That’s not true. But you’re an elder. They should come to you.” She bent—the corset was a knife in her ribs—and kissed his cheek. “Can I bring you a drink from the bar?”
Enzo nodded. “Per favore.”
With a pat to his shoulder, Giada headed off to scout the room.
~oOo~
After an elaborate meal and several long toasts, the reception dinner became a reception party. Soon, the band would transition to its dance-music set. Giada pulled an envelope from her formal clutch purse and scooted her chair back.
Enzo set his hand on hers. “That might be a bit much, piccolina. Maybe I should take yours and mine both.” He spoke quietly, so no ears could hear but hers. It was unlikely a bug would pick it up, either—though she had no doubt the room had been thoroughly swept before guests arrived. Wires on waiters, however, was a decided possibility.
The Name of Honor Page 7